How to Niche Your PT Business
Want to improve your income as a F2F or online coach?
Take a look at the importance of finding a niche and tailoring your services to your main clients.
Many PTs try to sell to everyone. As a result, they attract no one.
Inbound, pre-sold leads are the holy grail when it comes to long-term business success, but very few coaches ever achieve it, largely due to a poor ability to niche effectively.
What is a niche?
In the context of a personal training business, your niche is best defined as “a specialised segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.”
In other words, your niche is your ideal client.
How does having a niche affect your business?
Knowing who your ideal client is means you can structure your entire business around getting them the best results, in the shortest time.
Your ideal clients impact on your ‘5 Pillars of Business’.
1. MINDSET - you are set on helping them, not yourself.
2. MODEL - every business system is designed to service them.
3. SERVICE - the inclusion and exclusions are determined by their needs
4. CLIENTS - marketing, content, consults, sales and onboarding are refined to show how you can solve their problems.
5. BE GREAT - your skillset is tailored to facilitate their specific outcomes.
If you have any doubt about how much impact this will have on your clients, imagine signing up for a product or service that you feel has been specifically designed for you.
It could be your car dealership, your favourite clothing outlet or even your local coffee shop. The marketing speaks to you, the product solves your problem, and the feel of the place matches your personality.
Knowing your ideal client allows you to deliver all this. It’s a game-changer.
Vertical vs. horizontal niche
A common mistake we see with both in-person and online trainers is using the wrong niche type at the wrong stage of their businesses development.
This results in one of two things:
Inexperienced personal trainers struggling to fill their book because they’ve been too specific
Experienced personal trainers still training everyone despite it not aligning with their passions
There are two types of niches.
Horizontal Niche - these are non-specific and intended to meet the needs of a large group of customers, with a wide range of needs. Examples of a horizontal niche would be training “all women in X suburb”.
Vertical Niche - is a specific target client. For example, “All women in X suburb between 20 and 25, who want to lose 5kg”.
How to choose your niche
There are 3 filters to use when selecting your ideal client.
If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll have this data.
Simply look across all the clients you’ve ever worked with, pull out those who got the best results, and write down everything they have in common.
If you’re brand new, who in your gym or in the online realm do you have the best skill set, knowledge and experience to train?
For example, if you’ve lost a lot of weight yourself, consider training people who are seeking life-changing fat loss results.
Important considerations to identify when selecting your niche are:
Take some time to think about how the people in your niche would answer all the above questions.
The importance of finding clients who are willing to pay
The whole purpose of niching is to allow you to specialise in getting results for a particular group of people. As a specialist with a specialist service, you increase your value and thus your fee.
Expanding the example earlier, if you selected fat loss clients, it’s more likely a corporate worker will be able willing and able to pay for a premium service than a single mum. That’s not to say you can’t work with single mums… down the track you may be able to create an option for them, as well as your ideal corporate clients.
Where do you find the most fulfilment?
Imagine taking on the responsibility of running your own business, but not feeling fulfilled by the work you do.
For the third and last filter of the subsets you selected above, consider who you would like to work with the most.
Can you apply the table above to your ideal audience?
Identify your client's pain points
Describing your ideal client isn’t enough to change anything in your business. You need to understand them.
Personal training is a service in which you solve people's problems. To do this effectively, you need to know what they are, even better than they do, just like the car salesman from earlier.
You should be able to list 100 things your ideal client might find to be problematic (yes, 100).
You’ll likely find 3-5 main overarching problems your ideal clients have, which are expressed in 100 different ways.
If your business is designed to solve those problems, you’re 90% of the way there.
The last 10% is simply communicating that you know + can solve the problems in your public messaging.
For more on niche, listen to episode 127 of the STCfit Learning Podcast.
